The solutions?

So, with this mountain of problems facing Creative Labs, what on earth can they do to turn the tide?  This is where we enter the realm of pure speculation, so allow me to indulge myself in where I believe the company could, and perhaps should, be headed.

Start listening to customers

It's always seemed to me that, when it comes to their sound board business, Creative have ploughed a lone furrow, paying little heed to what the industry around them is doing.  There's no doubt that the X-Fi is a fantastic piece of hardware, but its lack of particular features is most definitely starting to hurt its sales.  More and more enthusiasts and audiophiles want Dolby Digital Live encoding and the like, and its something that Creative can't currently deliver.  Now that other companies have also managed to beat out Creative in the analogue audio quality department which audiophiles crave, it spells disinterest from a large section of their target market.

Then there are other issues, such as the state of Creative's drivers, bloated and unwieldy that they are.  Despite many years of complaints about the sheer volume of software that is installed and set to run on start-up during an installation, little seems to have changed.  Throw in the far from impressive frequency of driver and software updates, and again you have disillusionment.  Enthusiasts like their shiny new drivers, even when they don't particularly need them - A lesson already learned by ATI, and now NVIDIA in the graphics market.

Thus, work on Creative Labs' next discrete sound products need to focus on what buyers want that Creative aren't delivering, so that they can match and even beat some of the competition out there.  If they can do that, then the Creative name alone will start shifting boards off store shelves faster once more.

Take on the on-board market

Creative have never really shown more than a passing interest in the on-board sound market - The SoundBlaster 16 had a fair number of outings in this department, and we've seen Audigy and X-Fi processors find their way onto all singing, all dancing high-end motherboards.

With on-board sound now of sufficient quality to become a perfectly acceptable feature in the majority of PCs, perhaps now is the time for Creative to rethink this strategy.  Of course, they can't produce an on-board X-Fi quality board that will match the price point of Realtek et al's on-board solutions, but that isn't really what we're asking for.  Creative no doubt have the talent and capabilities to produce a feature-rich on-board part at an acceptable price, perhaps using their older Audigy technology as a basis - Again, where they to do so, the Creative name could well translate into some big design wins and perhaps loosen Realtek's grasp on this market over the coming years.

Stop manufacturing their own boards

Finally, onto possibly our most contentious point.  At present, Creative Labs follow what could be construed as a rather archaic way of doing business in the hardware market - Designing, creating and manufacturing their own parts from start to finish.  This is in stark contrast with the likes of C-Media, who design and manufacture simply the audio processor itself; leaving companies who wish to create boards around those chips free reign with regard to PCB design and the components used.  This both takes the financial burden over creating and marketing boards from start to finish away from the chip maker, while also giving partners the opportunity to differentiate their product however they see fit, be it from a price or feature standpoint.  We've seen this happen to great effect with C-Media's Oxygen HD audio processor - Simply check out our review pages and you'll find three very different boards using this chip.  In short, it's the same way ATI and NVIDIA have been working for many years to great effect - They create the cores and provide reference designs, and leave the rest up to their AIB partners.

Perhaps now is the time for Creative to go down this same route, either ditching the Creative Labs brand with regard to selling and packaging their own boards, or giving it a back seat while making their audio processors available for third party vendors to implement in their own designs.  This would allow Creative to concentrate on designing and selling chips, leaving the rest up to partners and hopefully creating a wide variety of, say, X-Fi-based parts, each with their own unique features, audio quality and price points.  This kind of competition would doubtless help to drive the market, and I'm sure there are several of the big Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers who wouldn't say no to releasing a Creative Labs-based range of sound products.  Everyone's a winner from where I'm sitting.

Final thoughts

I'm not normally one for putting the world to rights, and certainly not via a public outlet by way of an editorial - I'd be the first to admit that I'm no entrepreneurial businessman.  I'd also be the first to accept that, in the grand scheme of things, Creative Labs are in anything but dire straits.  Sure, they've lost out to Apple and have plenty of competition now in the lucrative MP3 player market, and as we've discussed their sound card business isn't as lucrative as it used to be, but the company are still a big name in the industry, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Therefore, the reason for this article was quite simply brought on by my recent time spent with non-Creative sound boards - The flood of parts that have arrived on my desk in recent months, coupled with the overall quality of these Oxygen HD sporting boards, set my mind wandering towards considering what ails the sonic giant of so many years past.  The more I thought about it, the more multi-faceted the issues facing Creative seemed, and the more fascinating their possible solutions became.  Hence this article, and my own viewpoints regarding these problems and their solutions.  Hopefully it'll generate some interesting debates, and I'm certainly looking forward to hearing the thoughts of the wider public regarding my hair-brained schemes!

I suppose the final question to close this editorial is whether I actually anticipate seeing Creative taking up and running with any of the points I've raised.  In all fairness to the company, customer feedback seems to have improved in recent times, particularly via Creative's own forum and an increased willingness to give users access to beta drivers and projects (such as ALchemy, for converting DirectSound EAX effects in game titles under Windows Vista into OpenAL).  If this trend can continue, then we may begin to see more frequent (and less bloated) drivers from the company in the future.

As far as my other two 'solutions' go, I really don't see Creative jumping into the on-board audio market to any real degree soon beyond the occasional special foray via an enthusiast motherboard - Indeed, it may be too late in many senses for them to enter a market already sewn up by Realtek and the like with ultra-cheap solutions.  I'd also predict Hell freezing over before Creative either stop manufacturing their own discrete sound boards, or start selling chips to their parties to sell their own boards.  Or rather, I would predict Hell freezing over before that happens, aside from the fact that I already predicted that exact same occurrence were AMD to acquire ATI, and look what happened then... Proof that anything is possible in the computer hardware manufacturing world...

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